anga Girls Need Love! {Under Distant Microscopes}

 

It’s a season of love & odd numbered pairings. At night, the crickets forget the B-side of their songs. You work hard to decode the gravelly voice of the radio DJ, a survivor of throat cancer & his own second-hand smog. The song he plays: The Moon Is Down. It’s the truth, you think. That night, in the stolen warmth of a car’s front seat, your boyfriend remarks that there is no moon, only a shade of blue different from day and some dirty hands. His hands are great deceivers. The back of his tee-shirt reads: Rebels With Lost Teeth. You remind him in your sweet-grungy Lolita voice that you are both under the stars. And the stars are really microscopes and the microscopes are the eyes of jealous trekkers who never found a way back to Planet Tokyo. From the slip of your eye, you notice a white-silver sailboat floating in the sky. You smile and know that some things are never lost. As you and he sink deeper into the comatose of the night, the belly of a fog that is cut open but does not bleed.

 

Everywhere You Are

 

I wake up next to Everywhere Girl. A thin shaft of light is streaming through a side window. It threatens to separate us. Everywhere Girl & I have woken next to each other before, it’s just that we can’t remember which parts belong to whom & we wind up leaving with a hangover of otherness. At the club last night, Storm Warning II, we danced as if we left our bodies. Strangers ogled us from their stilted life-frames. We listened to their stories of cut & drag, copy & paste. We dress in vogue–mawkish schoolboy & lanky drift-eye schoolgirl. We often improvise our own dance steps. Like the one where we laugh & pretend to look for keys. People often mistake us for brother & sister. There might be some kind of truth. The first time I met Everywhere Girl, she was very drunk, her father having been lost at sea for a whole three weeks. We danced to techno & held hands as if we could mean something. Later, she told me she could be my muck-doll. At an all-night diner, I said my real name was Nowhere Boy. I was not a survivor of childhood drownings. & even though after a night out, we wind up sleeping together as ones or zeroes, always at her place on a hard mat, we’ve made love only twice. Three is an unlucky number she says. Whenever I sleep next to Everywhere Girl, I feel lost at sea, imagining nameless fish, until I sink under slow, gentle waves.

 

Manga Girls Need Love! {If I Were Jimmy Stewart}

 

On some days I walk on Tokyo mist. On some days, we slip through the other’s grasp like irascible fish. Or if we meet in San Francisco & I catch you watching me from a distance of UP & behind a Knob Hill window, your face, my inward tilt, my dreams of vertigo-drop, still unravel me. On some days I am the private eye tailing clones of confiscated you’s. For days, I remain introverted & sulking. When I do find the You in my mug of wax, you start to melt. And I spend the rest of the day trying to gather what burns.

 

 

— by Kyle Hemmings

 

Copyright ©2012, by Kyle Hemmings. All Rights Reserved.